Someone else got the promotion I had worked for, and now I cannot stop comparing myself to my colleagues. How do I deal with this?

“For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another.”

This psalm was written for a people who watched kings rise and fall and knew how arbitrary advancement can look from below. It rules out the compass points one by one, east, west and south, and lands responsibility for promotion with God alone. That is not a claim that every workplace decision is fair. It is a claim about where the final accounting happens.

“But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.”

Paul writes to churches busy measuring themselves against one another over rules and status. His instruction is to test your own work rather than weigh it against somebody else's, because that comparison tells you nothing true about either of you. He assumes honest self-examination is possible, and that rivalry is what crowds it out.